Many Americans look at Yosemite with its timeless, great primeval forests with redwood trees having been around for hundreds of thousand years. Actually, humans were there many thousands of years before the redwoods ever appeared. Actually, a mere twenty thousand years ago the Ice Age receded in California, gouging out the Yosemite Valley, leaving a damp plain with no vegetation and with many lakes which in turn were fed by melting glaciers. After a few thousand years had past, the area further developed arctic tundra with tall grasses supporting small animals. Human beings migrated into the fertile mountains settling around the Yosemite Valley. The Indians started creating their own "carbon footprint" as they changed the environment to suit their own purposes while nurturing the natural phases of forest evolution forward contrary to popular urban land-use mythology of man interfering with nature leads to catastrophic global climatic pollution.
The Indians hunted the wooly mammoth and smaller game for food. While setting fires for
cooking, they also cultivated forest fires to cull out the dense forest growths to develop meadows for growing crops and open areas for grazing game. Indians discovered the forest fires burned down the tall redwood trees which cracked open the trunks to bare seeds that spilt out into the soil to propagate more trees to rejuvenate the forests. The North American continent meanwhile started to warm up further over the next few thousand years as trees species started to develop as the Douglas fir, hemlock and cedar moved in and redwoods took over creating great closed-canopy forests.
The Redwood forests have continuously changed their composition as each thousand year period passed. These forests have flourished without any U.S. Park Service, but after this Federal Government agency has managed it for just 100 years, it is failing - too many wrong-headed ideas and contrary regulations.
Playing God in Yellowstone - The U.S. Park Service
The National Park Service Act of 1916 made it a duty "to preserve the scenery, the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein, and provide for enjoyment of the same in such a manner and such a means as will leave unimpaired for future generations."
Everyone assumes we know how to manage national wilderness areas and so, in turn, able to manage world-wide global environmental issues with aplomb. I whole-hardily disagree and urge everyone needs to read this book about the sobering history of the century of mismanagement by the U.S. Park Service of the Yellowstone National Park.
Under President Ulysses S. Grant, an act of Congress on March 1, 1872 created Yellowstone National Park to preserve the park in its original condition. Yellowstone instead is being destroyed by the very people assigned to protect it: the U.S. National Park Service.
Prior to 1871, when the Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfoot and Crow tribes owned it and before White men could violate it, Yellowstone was an unspoiled wildlife sanctuary. able to well care for itself naturally without any outside intervention for thousands of years, even before the indigenous natives arrived.
Named as one of “ten books that mattered” in the 1980s by Outside magazine and a book of continuing crucial relevance now as environmentalists are pushing their latest agenda, Global Climate Change and legislative initiatives to control the World environment through
governmental agencies and laws - and the U.S. Agencies can't even maintain the Yellowstone National Park to be self-sustainable while the park service boastfully brags "Yellowstone is the flagship of our fleet."
The Yellowstone Park reputation as "a great game sanctuary" is perhaps the best-sustained myth in American Conservation history and the story of its decline is the U.S. government's best-kept secret.